About once a day, I get an email from someone I’ve never heard of with usually nothing (or RE: ) in the subject line. There is no actual content to the email–no text, and my security program doesn’t alert me to any graphics or other such content.
So what gives?
I wonder about this too. My WAG (sorry!) is that they code a huge batch email thngy and screw up the code so that the emails go out, but the text doesn’t show.
The sender is probably trying to determine if it’s a valid e-mail address, so they can sell it.
You mean you guys actually open them?
We don’t “open” them, but just clicking on a message in my email client shows its content below.
I also wonder about the spam that I get the most of - the subject line is two unrelated words usually, and the content is a couple of paragraphs of unrelated sentences. I don’t get the point - why would any spammer go to the trouble of sending me gibberish text? I get dozens of these per day.
Why? Because they can.
It’s absolutely no trouble for them…
In these cases, I doubt its a ‘spammer’ (one that has a legitimate yet misguided add to send out selling you viagra for your boob job), but more likely either someone ‘testing’ thier mailing software, or possibly testing what it takes to get by the auto-filters, or possibly, just people that want to continue to jam the networks with useless stuff… <conspiracy mode on> and they work for the anti-spam filter people</conspiracy mode off>
But I get dozens of these a day! Here’s an example first paragraph from one I just received a few minutes ago:
It goes on like this for four paragraphs! Without ever offering to sell me Viagra, or sex-enhancing products, or mortgages, or anything. It has to be a little trouble for them to send this out, so why do they do it?
Perhaps your email is blocking content? I get a lot of these too. If I click “show content” then a spam .gif file appears with a phony stock tip
I am Spamholio! I need Viagra for my boob job!
Well, would you look at that - it was a multi-part message, and the HTML content had a GIF file with spam info up at the top, but I only looked at the plain text part.
Could be that your email client or AV program, or mail server is blocking inappropriate content.
Could be that there is some kind of non-visible web-bug content (a malformed, uniquely-named HTTP request) that will indicate to the sender that you have opened the message (and thus verified that your address is genuine)
Could be a bulk mail sent out from an infected zombie machine somewhere, only that the infecting program is broken and because the actual owner of the machine is not aware of the infection, there is nobody to fix the fault.
Great. Now we’re all mind-controlled. Thanks a lot. :rolleyes:
You only just figured that out now?